ASP to Excel

I'm not sure which group is most appropriate for this
question; I'll also post this in office solutions
development. I am running into problems with something
that seems to be a popular requirement - porting data from
an asp page to an Excel workbook to allow users to
manipulate data. I have a few different methods working,
but also with some issues. I want to know if these are
technical limitations, or if there is another direction to
take such as web query...

I have successfully used the "Response.ContentType
= "application/vnd.ms-excel" in ASP to stream everything
in the page as an Excel document. However, when I use
this, simple SUM() formulas do not work in the resulting
Excel worksheet. The worksheet does not recognize results
from my dataset as true number types.

In response to a previous post, I tried using another
method - constructing, and manipulating a worksheet object
using ActiveX. This allows the user to play with the
resulting worksheet, however, they would be required to
change their default IE settings. This is a corporate
intranet app, and requiring our entire user base to tweak
their browser settings is going to be unreasonable.

I am trying to stay away from writing out distinct Excel
files on the server for performance, and security
concerns. As I understand it, web query will generate a
physical file to download. Can web query instead stream
content to a browser? Any other suggestions?

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using the code from http://www.greggriffiths.org/webdev/both/excel/ you
should be able to get a working sample where the XL file is created on
the server side and then a link is returned to the uesr allowing them to
open the file in their browser.

Ben Moen wrote:
> I'm not sure which group is most appropriate for this
> question; I'll also post this in office solutions
> development. I am running into problems with something
> that seems to be a popular requirement - porting data from
> an asp page to an Excel workbook to allow users to
> manipulate data. I have a few different methods working,
> but also with some issues. I want to know if these are
> technical limitations, or if there is another direction to
> take such as web query...
>
> I have successfully used the "Response.ContentType
> = "application/vnd.ms-excel" in ASP to stream everything
> in the page as an Excel document. However, when I use
> this, simple SUM() formulas do not work in the resulting
> Excel worksheet. The worksheet does not recognize results
> from my dataset as true number types.
>
> In response to a previous post, I tried using another
> method - constructing, and manipulating a worksheet object
> using ActiveX. This allows the user to play with the
> resulting worksheet, however, they would be required to
> change their default IE settings. This is a corporate
> intranet app, and requiring our entire user base to tweak
> their browser settings is going to be unreasonable.
>
> I am trying to stay away from writing out distinct Excel
> files on the server for performance, and security
> concerns. As I understand it, web query will generate a
> physical file to download. Can web query instead stream
> content to a browser? Any other suggestions?
>
> THANKS,
>
> Ben

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